WESTERN SIBERIA AND THE ALTAI MOUNTAINS
Photograph by Maynard Owen Williams
TIHE SPIRIT OF SIBERIA
Yellow sunset and boundless expanse of
forest fire is sending up a wisp of smoke more
taken from a swiftly moving train.
Whether Siberia will remain politically
a part of Russia, it is impossible to pre
dict. An able English observer, who
traveled there forty years ago (the late
Mr. Ashton Dilke), told me he thought
Siberia would break away, peaceably or
otherwise; but nothing I could learn in
the country confirmed that forecast.
The Transcontinental Railroad has be
come a bond of union, and the Ural
Mountains, though they would form a
good natural boundary if the peoples liv
ing on each side differed in race, speech,
and religion, do not, the facts being what
they are, constitute a barrier worth re
garding.
It is much to be wished that they were
such a dividing line, for the Russian
Empire before 1914 was an unwieldly
mass, too big for any one set of men to
govern, even had such men been more
capable than any Russian ministry has
ever been.
fine country, in the midst of which a raging
than twenty miles away. The photograph was
Yet in 1913 the Russian Government,
moved by that insane impulse which in
duces states to extend territories already
too large, was trying to establish political
control over Mongolia as far as the fron
tiers of China.
The portentous expansion of Russian
dominion and the growth of Russian
population had become a danger to the
world. It was a danger much reduced
by the stupidity and corruption of the
government, but if a malign fate had set
a genius like Frederick the Great or
Napoleon on the throne of the Tsars,
things might have gone ill for Europe.
PERHAPS A UNITED STATES OF SIBERIA
For its own sake, as well as for the
world's sake, it is much to be desired
that Siberia as well as Transcaucasia
should be disjoined from Russia; and if
the inhabitants of Siberia were capable
of working a system of federal govern-
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